In boardrooms across the U.S., CIOs are staring down a costly contradiction. According to fresh data from Azul’s CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report, 83% of enterprise tech leaders are blowing past their cloud budgets—on average by 30%—yet 80% still count cloud adoption as a cost-saving move. Welcome to the murky middle ground of digital transformation, where optimism meets overrun.

The survey, based on 300 responses from U.S. CIOs, paints a telling picture of where cloud strategies stand today. Despite the financial strain, cloud migration isn’t slowing. Actually, it’s speeding up. More than 70% of CIOs indicate most of their workloads are already in the cloud, and more than four out of ten plan for near-universal cloud use in five years. That’s not momentum generated by blind optimism—it’s propelled by actual gains in agility, analytics, and new technologies such as AI and machine learning.

But underlying the euphoria is pressure at the top. Almost half of CIOs say their CEOs or board members are sounding warnings about runaway cloud expenses. Some have started slowing down on expansion, and in exceptional instances, even shun new cloud investments. And while repatriation back to on-prem environments remains more theoretical than practiced, the whispers are growing louder.

To tighten the reins, CIOs are turning to cost-optimization tactics: smarter workload design, native cost tools, FinOps frameworks, and even alternate computing architectures. A growing share—30%—are also exploring high-performance Java platforms to do more with less.

This isn’t a retreat from the cloud. It’s a recalibration. The survey doesn’t suggest a collapse in cloud enthusiasm—only a reckoning. Enterprise leaders seem to be learning that cloud innovation without financial discipline is like a fast car with no brakes: thrilling, until it isn’t. The challenge now is to harness the cloud’s speed without losing control of the wheel.